LIVE OAK — Shopping with his dad in downtown Live Oak, a young Joe Hacker looked across Howard Street at the fading Spearmint mural and said that one day he wanted to paint that.

Now, decades later, Hacker Brothers Sign Company is in charge of restoring the old mural and an older Joe Hacker believes he’ll be finished with the project by the end of the week.

“I remember looking at this mural when I was a kid,” Hacker said. “I’ve got a picture of what it used to look like. I’m going to make it like it was.”

Hacker said this job is the hardest sign job he has ever had in his 40 years of experience. Not only does the project stretch across an entire building, it’s also on rough brick, which makes the painting extremely difficult, he said.

“I had to go buy a special brush for it,” Hacker said.

He had to cut his work short on Monday due to the wind and rain, but Hacker is confident he’ll have everything done by Friday. The job was paid for by the Suwannee County Development Authority for a minimal cost, said Tim Alcorn, chairman.

“How do you put a value on something historical?” Alcorn said. “There’s no way to put a value on your history.”

Alcorn said the repainting is a community project that the development authority wanted to do to give back to Live Oak. The biggest benefit will be the beautification of downtown, he said. When people head west on Howard Street now, they’ll see a fresh, new mural.

“People are going to see that thing, and they’re going to start talking about it,” Alcorn said. “It’s going to look good when he gets done with it, too.”

The new mural will also be a benefit to those businesses on Howard Street like Mack’s Sport and Pawn Shop, owned by Jimmy McCullers.

McCullers said he is happy to see the sign restored and looks forward to seeing it every day he comes to work. If not for the restoration, the mural would have just faded away, a piece of Live Oak’s history lost forever, he said.

“It’s good to see downtown history preserved,” McCullers said. “I don’t know if I’m going to see any economic benefit from it, but it’ll be nicer now than that old brick.”